What to expect from a job within marketing

Meet Jacob! Jacob works for the digital agency Magnetix Linked by Isobar and would like to share with us his experiences with strategic marketing.

What are your responsibilities within the company?

I work in the strategy department of the company, where we essentially develop digital strategies for our clients. Holistically, my responsibilities in regards to this revolve around the analytical process leading up to developing a strategy - i.e. the gathering, analysis, and ultimately translation of data into actionable insights. In a more practical sense, this entails preparing and analyzing data from surveys, interviews, focus groups, desk research (particularly large datasets), and workshops. In summary, it’s basically anything where you need to go from data to insight.

It’s often difficult to predict exactly what you’ll be doing for an entire week...

What does a usual day in the office look like?

Luckily, my usual days vary quite a bit. Recently, I’ve spent a lot of time working on statistical models that we could use to analyse the raw data from an online survey that we designed. That will likely lead to some days spent on number crunching and finding insights that are worth presenting. But it could also be entire days of doing workshops with clients, or helping out other departments in designing a strategic process for a new project. It’s often difficult to predict exactly what you’ll be doing for an entire week, which I find really exciting.

Concepts such as the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by Osterwalder et al., and the Blue Ocean Strategy model are popular to use as frameworks for workshops.

What is the most important thing that you learned at university, that you’re applying to your job?

Concepts such as the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by Osterwalder et al., and the Blue Ocean Strategy model are popular to use as frameworks for workshops. I’ve also become very grateful of that one statistics course I took during my bachelors, and in retrospect really wish I had paid more attention…

I also feel that all those bigger projects you had throughout uni have proven useful, particularly when we need to design a new strategic process for a client. Much like when planning for your academic project, its important to have a good overview, figure out what should be included in the process (i.e. should we have interviews, surveys or both?), as well as the time management the project. That last one is easier said than done!

How did you get your job?

I was fortunate enough to get a student job at my current workplace during my bachelors, by getting indirectly hired from ex-boss at my previous job.